Patch 6.0.2 Survival Guide

Patch 6.0.2 is upon us, and with it comes a host of changes to the game and our class. This post is your quick and easy guide to making the transition from raiding in 5.4.8 to raiding in the brave new world of 6.0.2.

Unlike usual, I’ll try and keep things short and to the point.

Major Game Mechanics Changes

These are all changes to core systems in the game that affect us as tanks, so you should know about them.

Hit and Expertise are gone – You’ll now automatically hit appropriate-level targets all the time. Technically speaking, there’s still a 3% chance to be parried when attacking from the front, but as a tank, you have a passive that gives you a free 3% expertise (Sanctuary for paladins) that eliminate that chance.

Everything was squished – You’ll note that stats are much lower than before, and the amount of rating on gear has been reduced substantially, but so have the conversion coefficients. So for example, it used to take 425 haste rating for 1% haste, but now it only takes 20 haste rating!

Tank mitigation was squished – To try and rein in tank survivability and self-sustainability, tank mitigation was nerfed pretty much across the board. You’ll find that many spells, especially ones that provided flat percentage effects, now provide less mitigation than they used to. We’ll talk more about details further down the page. However….

Health was squished… less? – You won’t have 1 million hit points anymore, but you will still have substantially more health compared to what you’d expect post-squish. That’s because rather than getting 14 hit points per point of stamina, you now get 60. This is all part of the revamped tanking/healing model they’re trying in WoD.

Snapshotting is gone – For the most part, damage-over-time and heal-over-time spells do not snapshot stats (like attack power, crit, etc.) anymore. There are a few exceptions, but none (at least that I know of) that we care about. The damage and healing of abilities like Eternal Flame, Sacred Shield, etc. will now dynamically update with your current stats on every tick.

Pandemic for everyone! – If you’ve played a warlock, you may recall a passive effect called “Pandemic” that allowed you to refresh DoTs to up to 150% of their base duration. That same mechanic (though reduced to 130%) has been applied to all HoTs and DoTs in WoD. This means that, for example, if you refresh Sacred Shield with 15 seconds remaining, the new duration will be 39 seconds, not 30 seconds. Likewise it means that refreshing it with up to 9 seconds remaining won’t “waste” any of the remaining duration.

And there’s one change so big that it deserves its own section….

Vengeance – GONE

Vengeance is finally gone. No more standing in the fire to boost your DPS!

It’s been replaced by a mechanic called Resolve. The tooltip for Resolve is misleading – much earlier in beta, there was a static component based on your Stamina, but that’s long since been removed. Now it just increases your self-healing and self-absorb effects based on the damage you take. Mathematically it’s fairly complex – I covered the original version in this blog post, but that’s now out of date – but for now all you need to know is that:

It doesn’t turn on until you’ve taken a certain amount of damage in the last 10 seconds,

It continuously re-calculates its value based on the damaging events that happened in the last 10 seconds,

It has built-in diminishing returns that limit its effectiveness to a 240% boost to your baseline (zero-Resolve) healing.

The plot below shows the diminishing returns curve as a function of “DamageMod,” which is related to your damage intake. Again, I don’t want to get into the mathy details today, so for now all you need to worry about is that it increases your self-healing more as you take more damage, with fairly smooth diminishing returns.

Resolve diminishing returns curve. “Old” refers to the version that gave -60% to all healing.

There are a few reasons that Resolve is pretty awesome when compared to Vengeance. First, since it’s decoupled from damage entirely, there’s no longer an incentive to stand in fire, or worse, jump through inane hoops to solo-tank bosses for huge DPS gains (Heroic 25M Garrosh, I’m looking at you…). The diminishing returns also ensures that it’s never worth taking increased damage – for example, if you take 2x as much damage, you won’t generate twice as much healing, so it’s a net survivability loss.And thanks to the changes to snapshotting, our self-healing abilities will dynamically update with Resolve. That means we can get rid of a ton of weakauras we’ve historically used, both for tracking our current amount of Resolve and for tracking what level of Resolve, haste, and so on we were at when we last cast Eternal Flame or Sacred Shield. I am really looking forward to hitting “delete” on a bunch of those auras!

Class Changes

There are a bunch of changes that affect Prot Paladins specifically that I want to talk about in more detail.

In the great ability pruning of ’14, many a skill was lost by many a class. As Protection Paladins, we lost access to Avenging Wrath, Devotion Aura, and…. that’s about it. So much for freeing up key bindings. Technically we freed up another key bind in Blinding Light, which was moved to the second talent tier.

Sanctified Wrath has been totally redesigned since we no longer have Avenging Wrath. Now it causes Holy Wrath to generate a charge of Holy Power and makes it hit like a truck by doubling its damage. No, seriously, like a truck:

Holy Wrath really does hit like a truck with Sanctified Wrath talented. It does nearly twice as much damage as Avengers Shield (with Focused Shield glyphed).

If you decide to take the Final Wrath glyph, you can add another 50% to that. In other words, if it does 10k damage with no talents, it does 20k with Sanctified Wrath talented and 30k if Final Wrath is glyphed. Fun stuff.

One downside of all of this massive damage is that Holy Wrath has a longer cooldown in Warlords, up from 9 seconds to 15 seconds. This is somewhat unfortunate from the perspective of picking up groups of adds, in that it will be less available than before. But it will hit significantly harder, so it’ll do a better job of picking them up when it is available. It’s just a shame that it still splits damage amongst all targets hit.

Level 45 talents have all seen some significant changes. Eternal Flame got hit pretty hard with the nerfbat. The base heal is unchanged (still identical to Word of Glory), but the heal-over-time portion was nerfed several ways, the biggest one being that it no longer benefits from Bastion of Glory. This is bad from a “massively overpowered self-healing throughput” point of view, but good from a balance perspective because… well… it was massively overpowered. This should put allow it to stay on more even footing with the other options in this tier.

I should also add that it got a quality-of-life improvement, though. Rather than having the heal-over-time portion heal for less when you cast with less than three holy power, it now just has a shorter duration. So if you need to emergency-WoG yourself with only one or two Holy Power, you’re not gimping yourself with the HoT – you’re just not getting the full 30 seconds out of it.

Sacred Shield, on the other hand, got hit with the… buffbat? Unlike in MoP, Sacred Shield ticks can now individually crit, and now that multistrike is a thing they can do that as well. So if your Sacred Shield normally ticks for 100, a lucky tick that crits and makes both multistrike rolls will tick for 320.

Selfless Healer got nerfed, in that it no longer benefits from Bastion of Glory. On the other hand, in all the re-tuning it ended up in a not-so-awful place. So it might actually be a viable contender in 6.x. More on that later.

As I mentioned earlier, many of our mitigation abilities got nerfed. It isn’t worth going into detail on all of them, but there are a few you should be aware of:

Shield of the Righteous‘ base mitigation was nerfed to 20% (from 25%), and each point of mastery now only provides an additional 0.75% mitigation (down from 1%).

Bastion of Glory only provides 6% per stack (down from 10%), and each point of mastery only adds 0.75% (down from 1%).

Finally, there are some new passive skills you should know about. The first is Bladed Armor, which is a hidden passive that causes bonus armor on gear to also grant attack power. This makes bonus armor a potent offensive stat in addition to its already-respectable defensive benefits.

The second is Riposte, which causes critical strike rating from gear to also grant an equal amount of parry rating. This gives crit rating a defensive benefit, so that it isn’t useless to us.

The third is Shining Protector, which gives multistrike a more significant defensive benefit. Any time we receive a heal, Shining Protector has a chance to proc an extra heal for 30% of that amount. It works on our own self-healing as well as external healing.

And finally, the new passive Sacred Duty increases the amount of haste rating you get from gear by 5%.

Gear Changes

After the patch, all of your gear will be “squished” in the sense that it will have much less rating on it. In addition, hit, expertise, dodge, and parry will be converted to crit, mastery, or haste. For example, here’s the dodge/parry chest from T15 before and after the squish:

Comparison of an item before and after squish and stat changes.

The one exception is that dodge and parry on “non-armor” pieces like rings, amulets, and trinkets, which can turn into bonus armor. Since bonus armor will be a fairly prized stat, this will make some items that were ignored pre-6.0, like Juggernaut’s Focusing Crystal, suddenly very desirable.

Dodge and Parry on rings, amulets, and trinkets can turn into Bonus Armor.

Gems were also squished – you’ll find that your 320 haste gems from 5.4.8 are now only 20 haste. On the other hand, that’s actually a buff due to rating conversion changes. Pre-patch, each of those gems gave you 0.75% haste, while post-patch they each give you 1.00%.

In addition, all of your hit and expertise gems will have turned into crit and haste gems, respectively. Wowhead has a great summary of both the new gem combinations and the other gear changes coming with this patch.

Between the more favorable rating conversions and a large chunk of hit and expertise on your gear turning into haste, you may find yourself significantly over the 50% haste cap when you log in on Tuesday.

Stat Priority

Unsurprisingly, the shuffling of stats, massive re-tuning of abilities, and tank mitigation nerfs all had noticeable effects on our stat priority. Whereas before, haste was our most-desired stat, it’s now only about average. On the other hand, mastery has really become strong, which in part led to the SotR and Bastion of Glory nerfs mentioned earlier.

I’ve tweaked the gear in this case so that we’re far enough below the haste cap of 50% that we aren’t artificially lowering its value. As you can see, mastery and bonus armor dominate, with stats like versatility, haste, and crit all trailing. Our new secondary stat priorities for survivability are,

Mastery > Bonus Armor > Haste (to 50%) > Crit > Multistrike

There are some caveats to mention here, of course. First of all, multistrike is probably a little stronger than the sim represents, because we’re simming without an external healer here. That said, I don’t know that it’s that much more valuable. It’s certainly a strong throughput stat when you’re being healed, but generally when you’re being healed you aren’t dying either. In the situations where you do die, which are usually situations where you have a shortage of incoming healing, multistrike’s value isn’t likely to be much higher than this sim predicts.

It will remain to see exactly how deaths happen in 6.0 before we can really estimate it more accurately – if trickle-down deaths over 10+ seconds are the norm, then multistrike will probably be a fairly strong stat that we may want to stack over haste and crit. If spike deaths in 5- to 6-second windows are still the target (as opposed to the 2-second windows we see now), then it’s not likely to be our go-to stat.

Second, we’re simming this against a T17 Mythic boss scaled down to level 90. So stamina’s value here is a little larger than it normally would be. Again, for Siege content you can probably skimp on stamina in favor of mastery for more mitigation, but until we really get a chance to play with 6.0 Siege it’ll be hard to say exactly how much stamina feels comfortable.

In case you’re wondering, the DPS stat priorities are a little different:

DPS stat weights.

In this case, strength reigns supreme, followed closely by bonus armor. Put in order, our DPS priorities would be:

For buffs or effects that give attack power, you can just recall that 1 bonus armor gives 1 attack power, so AP is exactly the same as bonus armor for offense.

I ran some quick sims of the same T16M gear set with different gemming patterns to see how they differed. You can see all of the specifics here, but in summary, I took the gear set and re-gemmed it for haste, crit, and mastery just to see what would happen. Here are the DPS and TMI results:

Different gearing strategies.

As you can see, the mastery build does hold a significant TMI advantage, while the crit build gives the most DPS. Haste doesn’t really excel in either department anymore, sadly. The entire report can be found here if you want to dig through it in more detail.

Talents

Obviously at level 90, we don’t need to worry about the new level 100 talents. So our talent questions center around the usual three tiers: level 45, level 75, and level 90.

Level 90 is the easiest. Execution Sentence is still top DPS, but neither Light’s Hammer nor Holy Prism are that far behind. Holy Prism is still a great choice for add pick-up and such, while Light’s Hammer is still a very versatile AoE pick-up tool. Both of their raid-healing capabilities are somewhat diminished by the removal of Vengeance – Resolve won’t boost their healing on other raid members.

For the other two tiers, here are some sim results:

Talent simulations.

At level 45, we actually have a fair choice. Even though it’s not on the plots, Selfless Healer has been surprising me in some of my L100 sims, mostly in that it’s not that far behind. But it’s still far enough that we probably won’t take it. That said, if you really like that play style, you aren’t gimping yourself as much by taking it after 6.0.

Between Sacred Shield and Eternal Flame, the race is tighter. You really aren’t in too bad shape with either choice, but even with the strength of the T16 4-piece bonus, Sacred Shield comes out ahead. It does, however, come with a small DPS cost thanks to the GCDs required to refresh it.

The HoT component of Eternal Flame only does about 1/3 as much healing as Sacred Shield provides in absorption, which is why Eternal Flame can’t really keep up here. Once we lose the T16 bonus that’s propping up Eternal Flame, it’ll fall even further behind. Without a significant buff, I don’t see EF competing with Sacred Shield at level 100.

Finally, for our L75 talents, we again have a pretty fair choice. Divine Purpose is dominating the TMI charts, but also gives the lowest DPS. Sanctified Wrath gives the highest DPS, but at a TMI cost. Holy Avenger performs respectably in both categories, though it trails the other two in TMI. Really though, they’re all fine, and it will generally come down to personal preference or which one suits the fight better.

To be honest, I’m pretty impressed – never before have we seen both the L45 and L75 talents so well balanced with one another. My initial sims suggest that this will remain the case at 100, which is pretty neat. It’s gotten pretty boring having only one “correct” answer in a tier, and I’m glad to see that we’re moving away from that.

Rotation

I’ve been doing a lot of work fine-tuning the rotation that I’ve used in these sims, especially for level 100. At level 90 it’s significantly easier, and doesn’t take much modification from what you’re already used to.

As you can see, not too much has changed. Holy Wrath is much higher in priority with Sanctified Wrath chosen thanks to the Holy Power generation. As we level to 90, the second Holy Wrath entry will actually drop behind Consecration once the Improved Consecration perk is obtained.

As far as Sacred Shield goes, refresh it in any empty GCD. If it’s about to expire, slot it in above anything that doesn’t generate Holy Power (so use it instead of Avenger’s Shield only if you don’t have a Grand Crusader proc).

Bump Consecration up to be equal with L90 talents (technically ahead of Execution Sentence, but behind Light’s Hammer or Holy Prism), and

Move Avenger’s Shield to the very top of the list if you have a Grand Crusader proc and you will hit more than one target (i.e. Focused Shield is not glyphed).

None of those should be all that surprising, and they’re basically exactly what you do now in AoE circumstances.

WeakAuras?

I’ve updated my WeakAuras on the beta, though I haven’t added level 100 talents yet. I’ll have a more complete post discussing what changed up in the next week or so. The links below will give you the import strings you need to get up and running though:

The Priority and Cooldowns groups are similar to before, but I’ve re-arranged them for the new spell priorities and removed spells we don’t have anymore (Avenging Wrath, Devotion Aura, etc.). The “Priority-SW” group is an overlay that switches the priority when you talent into Sanctified Wrath. Finally, the Resolve/Haste indicators are just simple text indicators that show your current haste percent and Resolve amounts.

Note that all of the Vengeance Bars, SS and EF indicators, and so on are all gone – they’re all irrelevant now, so it was nice to clean house and get rid of loads of excess auras. Those were also some of the more computationally-intensive auras, so the rest of the suite should run a little faster as a result.

One warning: on beta, the cooldown spirals weren’t working, and I couldn’t figure out why. I assume it’s a simple bug in WeakAuras that will be fixed eventually.

Ask A Theck!

That covers all of the important topics that I could remember, but it’s entirely possible I forgot to mention something. I’ve been working in “beta-mode” for so long now that the line between “current” and “beta” has started to blur. So if there’s anything you want me to clarify further, or any questions you have for me, feel free to ask them in the comments. I’ll try to answer everything that gets asked throughout the day.

Also don’t forget that you can run your own character through SimC to see how your personal stat weights work out. I’ll have a post up Friday giving you an overview of all of the new features we’ve added to SimC in the last few months.

Makes me a bit sad that haste lost so much value in the new sims. Oh well. Even if it isn’t a priority, we should still be able to get a fair amount of haste from gear, even without gemming it.

I personally preferred the rotation around 30-35% haste. Above that and I start losing room for fillers. Granted I run with a moderate amount of latency (about 220-280ms usually) so that may be a factor as well.

I ran my rotation pre-patch at 50% unbuffed. I’ve done a few test runs with the new build and saw a boost in DPS from 7-9k up to 10-12K. I am thinking about trying Sanctified Wrath instead of Divine Purpose. It doesn’t seem to proc as often and the DPS output from a DP Proc’d SotR doesn’t seem like it will outmatch. I’d much prefer to have a solid 3 hit and SotR rotation than relying on RNG, with a bigger DPS output (since we’re back to Vanilla aggro standards, we need it to keep up with a druid putting HoTs on the entire raid and getting multi-strikes).

Sitting at ~30% haste is really not that noticeable of a difference. We don’t need to have haste gems unless we are seriously lacking since we now that the 5% natural increase with our gear.

I think they did a great job at improving us for the most part, but either we need another DPS boost or other tanks need a nerf on their DPS, we don’t have great aggro tables, me and many other prot pallies noticed this issue while tanking SoO post 6.0.2

Is it safe assume the number of holy power we use on for EF will also effect our “pandemic like” effect? For instance, if cast with 3 HP, I am safe to recast at 9 seconds without clipping the HoT. If I needed an emergency heal and hit it with 2 HP, that only gives us a 20 second EF. Do I need to now wait until 6 seconds to recast in order to not clip the HoT?

I’m still a bit unsure about the value of haste. Should I now gem mastery instead which leaves me with 36.19% haste & 51.35% mastery according to askmrrobot (even less haste & more mastery if red sockets are filled with haste/mastery gems)? Doesn’t that mean a lot of waiting around and not doing anything?

Haste doesn’t actually have a large effect on the amount of downtime you have, because it compresses the entire rotation. At 36% haste, you’ll just cast fewer abilities per second than you would at 50%, but you’ll spend almost the same amount of time GCD-locked. It’ll just feel a little sluggish since your GCD is a little longer than before.

(Unless that’s what you meant by waiting around and not doing anything)

So, is the result of this that we’re gemming pure mastery now? Is there a cap, or do we need to moderate it with other stats? Is there a point where mastery isn’t better than any other stat? – and finally, is WeakAuras that much better than TMW, and should I get it for your strings?

Yes, the gemming will probably be pure mastery, though haste/mastery in red sockets to pick up useful bonuses is fine.

There’s no mastery cap you need to worry about hitting, and we can’t reach a value of it at which it falls far enough behind to be second-best (except to Bonus Armor, but you should just grab that everywhere you can anyway).

I assume TMW is TellMeWhen? If so, I used TMW a few years ago, but haven’t recently. WA was more versatile at the time (one thing it allows is custom lua-coded conditionals). My advice is to install it, fool around with it a bit (maybe import my strings) and see what you think. If you don’t like it, then don’t worry about it. The important thing is that you have some sort of visual aid to help you keep a tight rotation – what you choose to be that aid is entirely up to you.

Im curious about your personal feelings about the current soo set bonuses. Personally, after changing to a more mastery bonus armor type of build (mostly mythic warforged) I found myself rarely being spiked tonight on immersues thruough shamans. I am pretty much convinced that I am going to drop my 4 set as my healers said they couldnt oom if they wanted to. At this point Im starting to wonder if even droping the 2 set would be worth it was all mythic wf. I looked through some of your sims in regards to the tier set but it seems you mostly used all 4 set and our old BIS list in other slots. Not askin for calculations just your personal opinion.

I haven’t simmed that out yet, but my personal opinion is that it’s a toss-up.

From a numerical point of view, dropping both set bonuses for MWF off-set is almost certainly worth it. Switching to SS has made the 4-piece significantly weaker, and while my gut feeling is that the 2-piece still isn’t bad, it’s not game-changing.

If you have two good mastery/haste set items you can use then I’d probably keep using the 2-piece. But if you have really strong off-set pieces (high mastery w/sockets) then dropping all of your set items for MWF is perfectly acceptable. I was playing around with this myself yesterday, and I’m probably dropping the 4-piece myself.

The one downside of losing the 4-piece is that it’s a nice way to bank a free WoG for an emergency. But it’s hard to evaluate how useful that is compared to a significant amount of mastery – hence why I think it’s a toss-up. If you like that feature, keep using it; if you won’t miss it, don’t hesitate to switch to MWF off-set.

The 4 set was amazing last patch as you could always use it when you got spiked and healed to full a BIG hot afterwards. What I was finding was that I could never actually make use of the full heal last night as I really never did take a 50-80% health spike in damage. It seems if you are gonna keep the 4 set its best to use smaller heals when you are at 80% just so it can be used, which completely removes the whole emergency heal aspect of it. It might be nice for nazgrim, thok, and seigecrafter tho as those fights have some spikey damage. Ill find out tonight!

“Also don’t forget that you can run your own character through SimC to see how your personal stat weights work out. Check out yesterday’s overview of the new features in SimC to see all the stuff we’ve added.”

Oh. Hm. I originally had planned on posting the SimC post on Monday, but then shuffled things around since we weren’t releasing the new version until Tuesday. I had forgotten I wrote that bit in this post.

I posted some more about the haste issue yesterday – in short, it’s a strange anomaly happening between ~43% and 46% haste. I’m not entirely sure what’s causing it yet, but it looks like something’s causing a sudden increase in HPG in the sim at around 43%, which then causes an anomalously high haste stat weight. The curious thing is that at around 46% haste, actually starts *decreasing* your survivability somehow. I’m still not convinced any of this is “real” – I think it’s probably the result of some weird edge case in the sim that’s causing it to screw up the rotation. I’m still looking into it.

At any rate, if you look at various other tests (like I posted in the MT thread), it’s very clear that mastery is significantly better. Here are the stat weights I calculated for AMR:

Disclaimer upfront: I know Blizzard doesn’t care too much about balancing level 90 MoP at this point. However, what I’m seeing is pretty dramatic.

After making the haste->mastery switch for gems/enchants, my guild ran SoO. We’re typically a heroic (ex-normal) guild, and ran heroic. Overall, went fine, however I still have concerns. We did not have our normal off tank, so our dps DK filled in as he often does. The DK in simillar overall gear did ~40% more DPS, was sitting at ~15-20% less DTPS, had roughly equivalent HPS and better absorbs throughout the instance.

In general i went with last ex-pact setup, except for the aforementioned gem/enchant swap from haste->mastery, and went with SW and SS throughout. A few glyph switches throughout (mainly FS vs normal AS). Using stat, talent and ability priority as recommended above.

Still – am I missing something? I’ve always been an officer in said guild and amongst the best performers. Is it just extremely poorly tuned for 90 due to the vengeance vs resolve mechanics, or am i totally screwing something up? Didn’t run logs tonight, but usually do so could if needed later.

In my sims, yes, we’re behind in DPS at L90 by a fair margin. I’m getting DPS estimates between 7.5k and 8.5k from SimC, and my limited testing on a dummy (without raid buffs) suggests that these are reasonably accurate (I was able to pull around 6.5k-7k without buffs or L90 talents). Warriors and Blood DKs are simming significantly higher. I think that’s part of the reason for the last-minute 5% buffs to AS, SotR, Cons, and Holy Wrath that were hotfixed in, but that really doesn’t make up for a 30% or more disparity.

That said, the gap is much closer at L100. Remember that we get a big boost to Consecration damage from a Draenor perk, and our L100 talents are a significant DPS source (in some cases 30% or more of our DPS). So I think we’ll be fine at 100, it’s just now at 90 that we’re lagging.

I was seeing something very similar with our guardian druid. We are all 580+ mythic geared and he was crushing the dps. I’d be on trash mobs for 15s and he’d walk up, hit it, and pull at least everything that wasn’t my primary target off me (sometimes that too). It actually got so I kept looking up to make sure I had RF up and running. I had not talented into Sanctified Wrath yet, but can’t imagine it would make that much difference. Tank swaps on Sha and Galakras were rough. At least we still have Hand of Salvation!

Thanks for this post as always! It at least gave me some good ideas for how to maximize my damage output (kind of hate having to do that as a tank though at the cost of survivability).

To all that replied to the original post – thanks. Just glad to know it wasn’t me completely butchering a transition patch. Still annoying that they can’t come close to reasonably balancing those in the meantime, but at least it’s temporary. Thanks!

My mastery is saying “increases Block chance by 61%” but my Block chance is only 55.27%. Tooltip error or bug? I’m guessing that the diminishing returns formula on Block is still there but not calculated in the Mastery tooltip?

So do you think it’s possible to get close to full CTC again? Because I’m already at around 90% in Heroic gear, so it seems like if I had all Mythic Crit/Mastery gear with 2 amp trinkets, I could push pretty close to 102.4.

I’m pretty new to WoW, and I am currently leveling a Protection Paladin, which is level 33. One thing I noticed is that my Avenger’s Shield and Holy Wrath does much less damage now (went from around 400-500 to 250 or something). Why is that?

Just something I notice yesterday while I’m tanking with my prot pally. Seems the mana regeneration is off the chart. I was spamming flash of light on the 1st boss of UBRS when the healer dies. Being that I was tanking the boss same time. My mana seem to always fill up much faster than I can use them. Dunno if this was intended but it felt good =P

I have several questions that I can’t seem to figure out for configuring Simcraft for tanks, despite reading the information at: https://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft/wiki/SimcForTanks
I don’t know how to decide which options I should select in the drop down menus. (Options->Globals->Target and Tanking Options) What’s the difference between Fluffy Pillow and Tank Dummy? in which situations would I choose one or the other?
Do you think it’s best to choose a TMI Standard Boss that would drop loot above your item level? (if I’m full t16 normal gear, should I select t16 heroic?) or should I select content that would drop loot of the same gear level? (in full t16, selecting t16normal)
In a majority of the sims I get the following: Bonus Armor>Mastery>Multi>Crit~=Str>Vers~=haste>stam.
Due to these results, I feel like I’ve been doing something terribly wrong. If you could help me understand these results/tell me how to properly use the tanking part of SimCraft I’d appreciate it a lot. Also, how would I put the results into the custom weights for askmrrobot? should I use the ‘normalized’ scale numbers?

Fluffy Pillow uses a bunch of abilities, but it’s not well-standardized. You really want to be testing against a TMI standard boss.

I recommend choosing one above your gear level. At the moment, the T16 TMI bosses are fairly severely under-tuned since I didn’t have data on them, and had to guess. They should be tweaked a little more correctly in the next release.

The results in the post were achieved with a T17M boss. The sim will scale his level down to 93 if you’re level 90, but he’ll still hit as hard. This gives you results for a really hard-hitting boss.

Haste will drop fairly significantly in value if the boss isn’t hitting you very hard because so much of its value is tied up in SotR preventing back-to-back hits. If back-to-back hits cease to matter, then TMI starts turning into a DTPS-reduction metric.

My advice is to pick a boss with high enough damage to give you TMI values of at *least* 100k. That way you know that you’re in danger of taking fatal damage in a 6-second window, and you’re optimizing around reducing those spikes.

When putting those numbers into AMR, yes, use the normalized values. Just swap the sign on each of them (e.g. if mastery is -1.00, you put 1.00 into AMR).

Also, note that if you already have 40%+ haste, then haste will start being under-valued by the stat weights. We calculate stat weights by adding 70 haste rating (3.5%), so between heroism and any haste procs you might have (windsong, trinkets) you’ll be pushing yourself above 50% haste fairly often, making haste less valuable. To get a fair value for haste, you need a gear set that’s a little below 40% haste so that you’re not running into that problem (heroism will still make haste less valuable, but not exorbitantly so).

I’ve changed the TMI boss to be higher so that should fix that. The results seem to be more ‘standard’ with what I was expecting. However, the graph results for TMI stat weights are different from the results given from ‘scale factors for other metrics’.http://i.imgur.com/Pld4hRe.png

In regards to dancing steel, AMR seems to be rather obsessed with strength enchants (including dancing steel over windsong) on many pieces of gear, despite the very low priority for strength on my character. (second to last in value)
I’m aware there’s a bug with prot paladins and temporary crit buffs on live atm not properly adding to riposte — but I doubt simcraft is simulating with that bug in mind. As I recall strength adds to a prot paladin’s parry chance, as well as making our healing/absorb effects stronger due to the AP increase… however, I still think AMR might be overestimating strength’s value. Personally, I’ll continue with windsong because of its reputation to proc every other time I blink, and that there can be multiple windsong procs up at the same time.

I would like your opinion regarding the appropriate use of Seals at the current patch (that is excluding the tier 90 talent choice). Is there a “minimum gear/stat value” which should allow us to forgo some of the Healing provided by Insight for extra dps and threat generation provided by Seal of Truth? Is there a default superior choice?

Sure, it’s whatever your healers will put up with. If they don’t have trouble healing you with SoT active, then use SoT for the extra DPS. If you’re in a reasonable amount of danger during the encounter, use SoI.

It’s really impossible to put a specific set of numbers on that, because it depends on too many factors: how well you play, how well your healers play, what types of healers you have, how and how well they (and you) are geared, encounter mechanics, etc.

You mention that it’s a shame that Holy Wrath splits its damage among multiple targets. However, there is a minor glyph that it seems everyone has heretofore opined to be not worth socketing: Glyph of Focused Wrath. Despite that disdain, I have had it socketed for months, if only because the only other minor glyph of any actual use is the Glyph of Righteous Retreat (which I also socket) . The tooltip for …Focused Wrath says: “Holy Wrath only affects one target.”

I’ve always assumed that means all of the damage which Holy Wrath deals is applied to the target which the paladin tank has currently selected. Although it follows that all of the healing it radiates is probably applied to just one ally, too, whether that could be the tank, or which particular recipient that else would be, I do not know.

If Blizzard hears about this, either they will delete the Glyph of Focused Wrath entirely or change its status to Major instead of Minor. Frankly, I have always thought that it was meant to be a Major glyph but someone made a data entry error.

I think you are misunderstanding the statement. We are all well aware of the Glyph of Focused Wrath, and there’s no danger of Blizzard removing it (they are also well aware of it).

The complaint is not that Holy Wrath hits multiple targets. It’s that it has a “meteor” effect – in other words, it does X damage no matter how many targets it hits, and just spreads that damage amongst the targets. So if you hit one target, it takes X damage. If you hit two targets, each takes X/2 damage. If you hit three targets, each takes X/3 damage, and so on.

Now consider that in an AoE situation where you may be hitting 10+ targets and want Holy Wrath to provide snap aggro… it’s only doing X/10 (or less) damage to each target, while other AoE spells are doing 10*X (or more). Until they buff the threat modifier to 10000%, if someone else is doing ~100 times more damage than you, they will pull aggro. This makes Holy Wrath essentially useless for snap aggro.

The reason most of us dislike it is that Blizzard has claimed that this is an “iconic” feature of the spell, despite the fact that many of us have been playing long enough to remember that this effect was only added in Cataclysm, during a period when (a) the spell was used by Retribution, and (b) they were trying to cut down on “free” aoe. Before that, Holy Wrath was a normal AoE spell that did not have the meteor effect.

The meteor effect is entirely unnecessary now that both of those conditions are void (Ret doesn’t have it, and they’ve long since re-built how AoE rotations work and how much “free” AoE a spec should have). Hence why we’re upset – no matter how much they say “No, really, the meteor effect is *iconic* to the spell,” most of us know that it isn’t, because we remember the earlier version of the spell.

Hmmmm…… what you describe as the “meteor effect” of Holy Wrath is how I have always supposed that it works (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=119072). That is, it there is one target within its AoE radius, that target receives all of the damage. But if there are two or more, then it is equally divided among them.

So why doesn’t the Glyph of Focused Wrath change that? According to Wowhead, it does exactly what its description says — just put a checkmark in the Glyph of Focused Wrath on the page shown by the previous link, or use this one: http://www.wowhead.com/spell=119072

If it doesn’t apply all of Holy Wrath’s damage to the tank’s target, then what does it do?

The Glyph of Focused Wrath forces it to hit only your current target. In other words, just like you describe, it will always do X damage to the current target rather than X/N damage to each of N targets.

The point is that in Wrath, the spell did not have the damage-splitting (or “meteor”) effect at all. It worked like a normal AoE spell, that did X damage to each target in range, regardless of how many targets there were (up to the AoE cap, of course).

Gotcha. It took me a moment to realize you meant Wrath of the Lich King.

Since it is a Minor glyph, you don’t have to choose between using it and socketing some other Major. Combined with the enhancement of SW, you can pound the boss with all of its damage each time Holy Wrath is off cooldown since there’s no duration to SW. The Glyph of Final Wrath just adds momentum when the boss is gonna wail.

Of course, you do give up the AoE against multiple targets, but I think that the benefits are probably worth it. If a fight really demands AoE, just remove the glyph.

That said, I would like to apologize if I came across as insulting or condescending in asking about the Glyph of Focused Wrath. Sometimes I have a way of saying or writing things that I don’t realize can be offensive. I have an uncanny ability for hitting a nerve that I didn’t realize was there. (There are reasons for that, but this is not an appropriate venue to discuss them.)

Oh. Yeah, I guess talking about “Wrath” (the expansion) in a discussion about Holy Wrath is a little confusing. Sorry.

Anyway, point is: Focused Wrath is a useful glyph, but doesn’t really address the concern of Holy Wrath being weak for AoE snap aggro. Almost every other AoE effect in the game (and if I recall correctly, every one used by a tank) does more damage if it hits more targets: i.e., does X to *each* of N targets, not X/N to each.

That leads to a scaling discrepancy in AoE situations, because Holy Wrath is only doing X/N to each target, while another tank’s spell will still be doing ~X.

“Snapshotting is gone – For the most part, damage-over-time and heal-over-time spells do not snapshot stats (like attack power, crit, etc.) anymore. …. The damage and healing of abilities like Eternal Flame, Sacred Shield, etc. will now dynamically update with your current stats on every tick.”

Ah, so that is why they removed Holy Power as a multiplier for the amount of healing done by the Eternal Flame HoT, and just use the amount of HP at cast time to determine the duration. If they didn’t, then the multiplier would be zero for each tick after the cast until you use a HP producer, unless they granted it to be one. The same situation would occur each time your HP is reduced to zero.

With dynamic updating, in my humble opinion, they should have kept the BoG bonus for the HoT. You wouldn’t have any BoG after casting EF, so the HoT would be determined solely by Spell Power, but it would grow stronger as you use SoR. (Of course, you can then maintain the BoG stack, but SoR doesn’t refresh EF — using the BoG to cast EF is necessary to do that.) This could, I think, make EF a more reasonable alternative to SS, which is now apparently again The One To Choose as well as using WoG.

By the way, FYI: Selfless Healer is recommended for PvP. So are Clemency or Hand of Purity. Whenever a talent or glyph looks useless for Protection or Retribution spec in the context of instances and raids, it is usually there for PvP.

I’m not entirely sure that EF used the same snapshotting logic for HP that it did for other stats. But even if it did, they could have quite easily retained snapshotting of HP without doing so for everything else. I think that change was more of a quality-of-life buff, since it felt back to use a 1- or 2-HP emergency EF and overwrite your 3-HP HoT with a weaker one.

As far as BoG, again, I doubt that snapshotting has anything to do with it. Applying the BoG bonus to the HoT component of EF was a band-aid fix to try and allow EF to keep up with SS, but it wasn’t ideal. For one thing, it meant that as you gained more mastery, EF kept getting stronger and stronger while SS stagnated. That isn’t a good situation if you want to balance the two across an entire tier.

In practice, it’s better if the HoT is not affected by BoG, because then you can tune the spellpower coefficients of SS and the EF HoT to be complementary. For example, if each SS tick gives 30% SP, they could tune each EF tick can give ~15% SP, so they do similar amounts of healing and absorption. At least with that system, they’ll stay in lock-step throughout the expansion and will be relatively insensitive to severe swings in stat amounts. I think that EF is just a little undertuned at this point, and we’ll see buffs to it in 6.x.

Clemency and Hand of Purity both have completely valid PvE uses – they were extremely valuable on heroic modes of Thok and Garrosh, for example. They’re just rather niche. At any rate, I doubt anyone comes to this blog for PvP advice, so I tend to not talk about the PvP ramifications of anything – just whether it’s useful in a PvE/raiding context.

Yes, I see what you mean, i.e., Holy Wrath is relatively weak “for AoE snap aggro” because of the “meteor effect”.

How does Light’s Hammer compare?

For better or for worse, I have never talented it for combat because I cannot select the target with . We must use the mouse to position the AoE (the same thing for Consecration with Glyph of Consecration). Which means (a) press the key to which LH is bound on the action bar; (b) use the mouse to find the targeting circle and position it, then (c) click the left mouse button to cast LH. Step (b) ordinarily takes a while because the mouse cursor is rarely in view when I want to use the mouse in combat — the large AoE circle makes it easier to find but I still have to find it.

So, using LH or Consecration with the GoC is time-consuming unless you are a gaming mouse maven. Sometimes I think of taking that route but it is not easy for an old dog to learn new tricks.

BTW, I hope this posts as a reply to your reply in the same thread instead of as if it were an OP. I see this with others but I cannot ascertain why it has not been working for me, so far.

Light’s Hammer is better, because it’s a lot of damage in a short time, but it’s still a damage-over-time effect. Holy Prism is a better choice for snap aggro in that regard.

As far as replying to comments, there should be a small “Reply” link underneath each comment. If you click on that, the “Leave a Reply” box should indent, and when you hit “Post Comment” the comment should end up nested underneath the post you’re replying to. If that’s what you’re already doing, then I’m not sure what’s wrong.

(sigh) God cursed me with the ability to find bugs in software just by using it that no one else would ever find. I crashed a compiler that had been running bug-free for five years with thousands of users. I found a bug in the IF statement used in Excel macros. I found a bug in the Microsoft linker while using it to link an executable that I wrote in Microst Assembly Language. If there’s one piece of software that should never have a bug, it is a linker. Or the robot controlled by the software used by your proctologist.

It’s not just you then – I’ve seen a lot of other comments fail to nest properly. The problem is that it’s tough to reproduce, because it doesn’t happen all the time. And of course, when it does, there’s the question of whether the poster accidentally used the default reply box at the bottom.

Will AskMrRobot be updated to reflect the viability of dropping the 4-set bonus, which has been discussed in comments? I ask because my AskMrRobot still recommends the tier pieces for the default build. I’m a 582 mythic geared Pally. All of this expansion change is happening right in the meat of my busy time of year with teaching, so I’m relying on AMR to simplify the thinking for me!

I really can’t speak for AMR – they perform their own valuations of set bonuses and trinkets and such. I would hope that if you spec Sacred Shield they significantly devalue the set bonus, but some of that is a matter of opinion (“Do I like having a free WoG in my back pocket?”).

Quick question. It might be me reading it wrong or my ignorance about math and its ways of writing things down, but should not it be “q=1-exp^(-0.045*x)” instead of “q=1-exp(-0.045*x)” on the Resolve chart?

In any case its great to see that you are going to continue your amazing work in WoD! I am a big fan of yours!!

This is a reply to your reply to Shad quote: (“Do I like having a free WoG in my back pocket?”)

Yes, I would like it — especially now that Crusader Strike, Hammer of the Righteous and Judgment can miss the target. Each has a 5% chance of missing about which you can do nothing, correct?

I’ve been working out on target dummies, as I often do, investigating WoW 6.0.2 anomalies.

Try this: see how long you can maintain a BoG stack before your paladin fails to generate enough HP to refresh its duration. Good luck, because you’re gonna need it.

Each miss costs one cooldown but the attempt doesn’t cost any mana. What this most often means is sacrificing opportunities to use AS, ES, LH, HoW, Cons or HPr. to try again … and again … and again … because, remember, each and every one of your HP producers have the “same chance” to miss the target. There’s nothing to stop two of them from missing at least once, one after another. I’ve had Crusader Srike miss three consecutive swings. It is _so_ entertaining to watch the BoG stack duration dwindle while your paladin’s mighty swings produce nothing.

Five percent? In my experience, the misses are more like 15% ….. But there cannot possibly be anything wrong with Blizzard’s usage of their RNG, can there?

What I am wondering is whether instant-cast spells that do not trigger a cooldown — like Shield of the Righteous — can also miss the target.

By the way, in my experience, HW does not produce a HP each time it is used while Sanctified Wrath is selected, and I don’t believe it is doing much — if any — damage at all. Whenever one of the others hits the dummy, a 3- or 4-digit number flashes over the paladin’s portrait, but not when I cast HW.

None of your abilities can miss a target that’s (level+3) or lower. Likewise, I’ve never seen HW *not* produce holy power with SW talented, and I’ve tested it’s damage against dummies on both live and beta to confirm that it is doing exactly the advertised damage.

I assume the misses you were seeing were happening against a Raider’s target dummy. Note that with 6.0, they’ve updated the Raider dummies to be level 103. If you’re testing against those on live you’ll see very high miss rates (like the 15% you observed). In actual raid situations, that won’t happen. You should never see a miss against a raid boss.

I assume the Glyph of Focused Wrath is going to be a Glyph On/Glyph Off situation if I want to maximize DPS.

Beyond that, I am disappointed that Blizzard has not fixed Paladin aggro for more than one target. It really is silly that, in SoO M, an equally-geared Druid or DK can pull targets other than my primary target off of me AND do better DPS AND have better AOE aggro. It makes being a Prot Pally a choice made from true love of the class because it certainly doesn’t seem to provide many benefits.

I’ve wondered why they don’t have tank focus roles – Warriors have greater single-target DPS, Druids have greater health, DKs have greater survivability, Paladins have greater multiple-target DPS, etc. It seems like that sort of system would be more enjoyable.

Hey, Shad, your ideas are interesting, but I would not make single-target DPS vs. multi-target DPS a “focus role”.

Your example would make Warrior tanks the go-to class for single-target boss fights and relegate Paladin tanks to multi-target duties. There is no particular reason for any class that has a Protection spec (thus tank role) to have greater single-target DPS, greater multi-target DPS, greater Heath, or greater survivability than any other class.

IMHO, it is bad enough that Warriors can dual-wield two-handed weapons without needing four arms and hands.

Yes, I’ve been testing against the larger Raider’s Target dummies. I had no idea that would increase the miss rate, which implies that Blizz is still using the miss table that we had when our characters had Hit as a secondary attribute. Only now we can’t do anything to improve our chance of hitting.

I would suppose that HW is not producing HP while SW is talented because the miss rate is at least 18 in 20. Is that because the target is a Raider’s dummy too?

Which leads me to ask: why are Raider’s target dummies different from others? I have never seen anything displayed for a dummy that discloses anything about its attributes, e.g., the level. Their health and mana bars are usually static. The words “Raider’s Target Dummy” occasionally appear on the wall behind it. The word “cursory” comes to mind when I think of their implementation.

As far as I can see (or not see, actually), the absence of whatever audio-visual effect a spell like HW or Judgment has is the primary indication that the cast has missed. The problem with that is the player may not recognize what the audio-visual effect is when the spell succeeds, or the contrast between them is not seen often enough to be informative. The -absence- of success is not necessarily recognized as failure.

The other indicator of a miss is the absence of any damage flashed on the Paladin’s portrait, far from where the target is displayed. (That is a curious place to display it because the Paladin is not the target. It should be on the target’s portrait.)

Ummm…. I suppose that you thoroughly tested Execution Sentence on beta and it is working as advertised, too? In my experience so far, that has not been the case at all. It usually fails to cast entirely, whether that, too is a “miss”. Usually a self-cast works, but not reliably. Why would you miss yourself if you are the target? I can tell you what I see, I can’t tell you why. Where you get so much information is a mystery to me.

This happens pretty much every pre-patch, so presumably the Raider’s dummies are coded to be something like \$max_player_level + 3. When 6.0 hits, \$max_player_level gets bumped to 100 even though we can’t actually get there yet, causing this sort of problem.

In practice, I just test against the equal-level dummies, which are still level 90 for whatever reason.

For testing whether something hits or misses, the combat log should contain miss information, and any of various combat stats addons (Recount, Skada) will give you aggregate data. Likewise, you can configure scrolling combat text addons to display misses prominently (many melee classes do this so they can see if they’re unintentionally getting parried).

Execution sentence works as advertised, but it’s a binary hit/miss per cast. In other words, it’ll appear to not cast at all if it misses, rather than rolling for each individual tick. It shouldn’t ever miss if you self-cast though – I’ve never seen that happen.

Hmmm…. unfortunately, at least when attacking the Raider’s Target Dummy, self-cast ES has sometimes failed to proc, i.e., the paladin clearly casts the spell, and the cooldown countdown is displayed on its icon on the action bar, but the hammer does not descend from the sky and the amount of healing it applies as it descends is, of course, not displayed onscreen.

Also, on one occasion, either ES failed to proc when I self-cast it in combat, or the host did not receive my keypress input before deciding that the boss would kill me. For that matter, casting Ardent Defender has never spared my paladin, either. Lay on Hands usually works, but I wonder whether Divine Shield is actually up for as long as the tooltip says.

Whether audio-visual effects accompany any action is unpredictable. When a paladin misses, the client displays a “reduced” version of the AV effects that occur when the paladin hits. Or sometimes it doesn’t display anything at all. AV continues to evince anomalies just about everywhere and in just about everything that I do. For example, the e-mail mailbox flag is permanently displayed, so I don’t know whether new e-mail has arrived. But I digress.

The problem with the combat log is that it contains so many totally irrelevant entries — most of them seem to come from duels or other PvP activity ocurring somewhere, and not necessarily in the zone in which my paladin is located. When I complained to Blizz about it the GMs just said that the Combat Log has a lot of configuration options — as if I did not know that, but they never volunteer any instructions or information about any of those options.

Not that they matter, because trial-and-error experimentation reveals that regardless of the options, Blizz insists on filling the log with junk, effectively rendering it useless for anything but analysis with a software utility, perhaps, that I don’t have. Only God knows why they do that.

Maybe there is a way to configure Recount to do so, but I don’t recall a way to get it to record a “fight” with a target dummy. Not that all of my testing is only against target dummies. I also wander alone into dungeons, or go out to the Dread Wastes to fight hordes of mantids; But Recount doesn’t show then, either. The biggest problem I find in dungeons is the constant stuns and other things that I cannot avoid which totally disable my paladin and do not allow me to escape, even with EMFH. Oddly, most of them don’t happen while I am in a group. I really wonder why Blizz thinks that would be something a player enjoys.

With that in mind, I see that Sacred Shield already got some boost. Now, how does Versatility affect the situation? The concern from tankspot was that, Versatility stat had no point of diminishing return. Basically, sufficient Versatility stat would render SBlk rather useless, as SBar would vastly outperform SBlk.

Would similar thing happen in prot Pally’s tool set? Would that result in SS vastly outperforming EF, for instance?

No. Versatility affects both EF and SS, so it wouldn’t make any difference there. Our equivalent situation would be WoG vs. SotR, and I doubt we’ll be able to stack enough versatility to really make “WoG spam” a viable tactic. Our really big WoGs are limited pretty heavily by Bastion of Glory.